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Amiga A1200 finally setup.

It’s been awhile and i’ve been meaning to do this for a looooong time now – My Amiga 1200 is finally out of it’s storage box and setup on my desk for some retro fun.

At the moment my I’m still using a stock 2mb A1200 with external floppy drive but I plan to slowly build up a few hardware addons as and when budget permits. I’ve also got a stack of diskette boxes containing games, demos, programs and i think i’ve got some of my Deluxe Paint and Imagine 3D projects disks here too. I haven’t seen some of these in over 15 years so it would be nice to get them archived, assuming the disks can still be read.

This particular A1200 is the third one I’ve owned and the previous two (Desktop Dynamite packages) are long gone. Unfortunately one died during one all day gameathon and the other was sold many many years ago to help fund the purchase of my very first PC during the PC gaming explosion thanks to the titles likes of Doom and X-wing….and CD-ROM drives with games like 7th Guest…erm..ok probably not that last bit.

As popularity and demand for the Amiga seemed to have dwindled in favour of PC’s and Commodore themselves going down the tube, my rather large collection of hardware and software sold for a fraction of the original price and letting it go is something I deeply regret now, especially as the accelerator/ram card would be really useful for WHDload. Hey-ho, live and learn 🙂

This is my current A1200 from the Race ‘N’ Chase sold around 1993 feature Nigel moustache Mansell and Trolls…which is just pants even with the AGA sparkle.

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Set up on my desktop and ready to boot. The case is still fairly white, but I’ll give it the RetroBrite treatment this summer to remove the subtle hint of yellowing.

Yay, well it booted ok and no smoke yet.

Testing the internal floppy drive with Lotus…..which took about an hour. Such a great game 😉

All seems to be working o.k so far. I had planned on installing a 4gb 2.5″ Harddrive taken from an old DOS laptop by instead had opted to try one of those SD card/IDE adaptors. I ordered one about a month ago and it’s been sitting in my desk drawer waiting for me.

What I’m really looking forward to, is having a go at preparing the SD card/hardrive on my PC running an emulated A1200 under WinUAE. I have no idea how to do this but it should be fun to play around with it. I’m hoping to install Workbench and a few other bits n pieces as my Workbench floppies (especially Locales and Storage) are looking a bit ropey.

Awesome! Congratulations on hooking up your Amiga 1200 again! 🙂 Very happy to see that the computer is working properly and that it looks to be in nice condition. I’m sure you had a good time trying out various games on it. Lotus is great fun. 😀

As for installing Workbench, then I recommend you have a look at the Classic Amiga Workbench website. There you’ll find complete Workbench setups for all kinds of configurations. Here is the link: classicwb.abime.net

2MB RAM is not much and you’ll certainly gain a lot of performance by adding Fast-RAM. I’m currently on a 2MB setup myself, but I’m waiting for a Microbotics 1230 turbo-card with 16MB RAM and an FPU to arrive. That will open up a whole range of new possibilities (WHD-Load, Internet and demos).

Those PCMCIA memory boards are decent enough. They are not as fast as regular turbo-cards and memory upgrades due to the restrictions of the PCMCIA port, but works well with WHD-Load. Certainly an easy way to upgrade your machine though. If I’d have to choose, I’d pay a few bucks extra to get a trapdoor expansion. That way, you’ll still have access to everything the PCMCIA port offers. In that respect, I’ll recommend getting an PCMCIA Compact Flash Transfer Kit from Amigakit. I’ve got one of those and it makes it incredibly easy to transfer stuff from all kinds of devices to the Amiga. Well worth the money! 🙂

Good luck in your hunt for a mouse. 🙂 I use an optical mouse on the Amiga together with a Micromys mouse-adapter.

I’ve been meaning to get a A1200 for some time now – preferably installing some modern form of SD storage. I believe Gideon of 1541 Ultimate fame is working on something at the moment. There is no denying this is the best looking machine CBM ever made. I may treat myself to one for Xmas 🙂